Gotham Producer Explains Why There Wasn’t Much Batman in the Finale

Gotham executive producer John Stephens explains the series finale, which offered just a glimpse at a ten-years-later Bruce Wayne (David Mazouz) suited up as Batman, was focused on the crime-ridden city — not its caped crusader.

"When it came down to it, that wasn't the focus," Stephens told THR. "The focus was the city."

That meant shining one last light on its ensemble of characters, including Commissioner Jim Gordon (Ben McKenzie), Penguin (Robin Lord Taylor), Barbara (Erin Richards), Harvey (Donal Logue), Alfred (Sean Pertwee), Lee (Morena Baccarin), and others.

"From very early going we knew that the series would end with Gordon looking up and seeing Batman above him," Stephens explained.

"We were telling the story about the city that created Batman, and we were telling it primarily through the eyes of Jim Gordon, the man who was there at the beginning, and without whom, in our eyes, Batman would not have existed. So it felt narratively right that the series would end with Jim looking up and seeing Batman."

And the idea to place nearly the nearly the entire finale episode a decade into the future "actually came pretty late," Stephens said.

"For a long time, we were planning that we would just have part of the finale in the future. Perhaps just the last act. But then we came to realize a couple of things. One was that we couldn't tell the end of the season five story of 'No Man's Land' and the arrival of Batman in the same episode. Both were huge stories that didn't necessarily fit into each other story wise. So we split them apart.

"Then once we started looking at the arrival of Batman as a story by itself, we realized how much we required to get us there — how to tell the story that this was the time the Batman had to show up, so that it felt like a necessary part of the story and not just punctuation. So we needed a full episode."

And for its colorful cast of characters "with whom we had spent five years," Stephens added, "We wanted to see where Penguin, Nygma, Barbara, Harvey, Alfred, Jim and Lee all were 10 years on. It took time."

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